Hi folks, welcome to Dan Snow's history here.

When they were asked to lay down their weapons by the King of Kings, the Lord of Asia, Xerxes of Persia,

they simply replied, come and take them.

And in the battle that followed, in that narrow pass in northern Greece, a legend was born,

the legend of Sparta.

Now, long-time fans of this show will know that we loved a little historical myth-busting.

We like to take the legends, we like to look at the stereotypes that people might have got from

novels and movies and popular culture and we like to give you the real history the cold hard facts

because we believe that they're actually more engaging more astonishing and interesting and there is no

civilization no group no people more mythologized in history, in fiction, in film, than the Spartans.

Today a generation of us knows them from the movie 300, a muscle-bound Gerard Butler in his

red cloak bellowing, This Is Sparta, and he goes on to sell his life dearly at the Battle

of Thermopylae.

Turns out that that movie was the Canary and the Colmine,

the inciting instant, the start gun for the manosphere,

which washes around us at the moment.

But actually, it's not just this generation that are obsessed with Sparta.

Even in the ancient world, Sparta stood apart. Tourists flocked there in the centuries that followed Sparta's heyday to learn about this city that were shrouded and

mystery. It was feared. It was admired for its militarism, its discipline. So how much of what we believe,

what their contemporaries believe in those that followed. How much of all that is true?

In this episode, we're going to try and answer that question. And there's no better person

to sort out facts from friction than Dr. Andrew Bayliss. He's from the University of Birmingham and

...